New Generation of Stars Emerges in Alpine Events

KRASNAYA POLYANA, Russia — One of the earliest images of the Alpine competition at the 2014 Winter Olympics was Bode Miller as he streaked down the treacherous downhill course far ahead of the field in training. Miller, an Olympian since 1998, was somehow turning back the clock and had made himself the favorite in the opening, and premier, ski racing event of the Sochi Games.

Two weeks later, the 36-year-old Miller, hobbled by two sore knees, withdrew from the concluding men’s event, the slalom, which almost certainly was his last chance to create a final Olympic impression in a long and record-setting career.

By then, 18-year-old Mikaela Shiffrin had won the women’s slalom, 24-year-old Anna Fenninger had rescued a struggling Austrian ski team with two gutsy medal performances and another Austrian, 23-year-old Matthias Mayer, had defeated Miller in the downhill.

The Alpine races of the Sochi Olympics were not strictly a youth movement. Tina Maze, 30 and in her prime, proved why she was the best women’s skier in the world last year with two gold medals, and Maria Höfl-Riesch, 29, continued her climb toward the Olympic women’s record for most Alpine medals with a gold and a silver. But there was an evident advance of the next generation of dominant skiers.

While other recent Olympics featured Miller, Lindsey Vonn, Aksel Lund Svindal and Julia Mancuso, who combined for 10 medals at the 2010 Vancouver Olympics, the Sochi Games were a showcase for other faces, from Switzerland’s Lara Gut, who won her first Olympic medal, to Austria’s Nicole Hosp, who won two medals, to Italy’s Christof Innerhofer, who was a surprising two-time medalist.

Vonn did not compete because of a knee injury, and Miller, Mancuso and Svindal combined to win two medals, both bronze.

Looking ahead four years, the early story line is whether Vonn, Höfl-Riesch and Mancuso, who will all be 33 in 2018, will still be threats to skiers like Shiffrin, Fenninger and Gut, who is only 22.

Miller will probably be retired by 2018, as will Ivica Kostelic of Croatia, another medalist from the Sochi Games. Will Ted Ligety, the gold medalist here in the giant slalom, still be a force four years from now, when he is also 33? Or will it be the 22-year-old Alexis Pinturault’s turn? Pinturault, the French technical event specialist, won his first Olympic medal in Sochi. Or will the 2018 Winter Olympics make a star out of Norway’s Henrik Kristoffersen, who at 19 became the youngest male Alpine Olympic medalist with a bronze in the slalom on Saturday?

Image

Bode Miller, 36, won a bronze medal but was hobbled as the Games ended.CreditDoug Mills/The New York Times

There is ample time to ponder these questions, but change is looming. Miller, whose six Olympic medals are the second most in men’s Alpine history, may hold on until 2015, but it is hard to see him competing past that. Svindal, 31, a five-time world champion, was expected to win a medal in one or two events but instead was kept off the podium. Vonn has set the 2018 Olympics as a goal — and she’s good at goal-setting — but first she has to re-establish herself after a second major reconstructive knee operation. She may not return to racing until January.

Mancuso, a four-time Olympic medalist, hinted she would be back in 2018, but it was more telling that after she won a surprising bronze medal in the super combined, she skied without much dynamism in her next three events here. It was as if the Olympic spirit had run out on her.

Höfl-Riesch had the best 2014 of her age class among the women and is also a four-time Olympic medalist, two medals from Janica Kostelic’s record haul of six. But in the end, Höfl-Riesch also looked like a veteran caught in the buzz saw of a youthful revolt during the final women’s event of the Alpine competition.

Shiffrin had stormed to a commanding lead halfway through Friday’s women’s slalom. Höfl-Riesch, the defending Olympic champion in the event and a three-time Olympic gold medalist, was in second.

In the final sequence of the race, the two would make consecutive runs down a pitched slalom course in dicey snow conditions.

The powerful, 5-foot-11 Höfl-Riesch went first and appeared out of sync from the start. She slid off her intended line several times and fought to regain her rhythm but then lurched through a series of arduous turns. She completed the second run with the ninth-best time and a look of bewilderment on her face.

Shiffrin, who was 5 when Höfl-Riesch won her first international ski race, roared down the same racecourse, and although she made a significant mistake, she finished more than a second ahead of the defending Olympic champion.

Höfl-Riesch, always magnanimous, complimented her young competitor.

“Mikaela is going to win many, many races,” she said. “I’m sure this is only the beginning.”

It may be only the beginning, but the rest of the story, and the rivalry, is far from over.

The next day Shiffrin announced that she wanted to win each of the five Alpine events at the 2018 Winter Olympics.

Correction:

An article on Feb. 24 about the new generation of Alpine skiing stars that emerged at the Sochi Olympics misstated the number of Olympic medals Maria Höfl-Riesch has won. It is four, not five, so she is not “one Olympic medal from Janica Kostelic’s record haul of six.”

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page D5 of the New York edition with the headline: New Generation of Stars Emerges in Alpine Events. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe